Friday, October 25, 2013

Ireland is Dying and Our Political Class is to Blame

It can be either stupidity or heartlessness to kick a person
while they are already down. In some cases it is a shocking mixture of both.
Yet this week our government did exactly just that. In passing a bill that cut
the job seekers allowance for young people , in some cases down to a paltry sum
of 100 euro a week, the members of the Dail have told the youth of today they
are not important to Irish society. Indeed, by singling out people under 26 for
different and lower dole money, they have in fact created a new realm of
economic discrimination. Not only has the recession, a product in large part
the creation of policies by many of these deluded few residing in Leinster
House destroyed the prospects of a generation, they have now taken away any
chance of living a respected and dignified life. It is in essence a slow push
out the door on the path to emigration.

For a long time Ireland was considered a country brimming
with youthful vigour. On IDA pamphlets given out at trade fairs over the world
for the last thirty years, one of the biggest boasts was of a country full of
young, educated people, ready and waiting for you to hire them. Demographically
we are a young country, with a sizeable proportion of our nation under thirty.
Yet this is no country for the young. It never was. For decades we exported our
young and today that social disease of emigration infects the country all over,
destroying communities and tearing apart families. For all the talk of the good
times in the late 90s and early part of the last decade, it was a shoddy
façade, held together by cheap credit that when the banks almost collapsed in
2008, the superficiality of our wealth could be seen in harsh black and white.

For all the cautious optimism of the past few weeks about
growth picking up for the first time in over half a decade and the return of
our keys of economic sovereignty we shamefully lost three years ago, we are a
nation dying. It is not because of the burdensome debt; we had been there
before in the 80s. It is a sense of necrosis which has been festering for
decades that results in us haemorraging our greatest asset, our youth. For all
the talk of people leaving Ireland out of economic necessity, there is very
little said about the sizeable minority who has left this country since the
recession started that did so out of choice. They left perfectly good jobs in
Ireland to live elsewhere and this has always been the case. It is not because
the grass is always greener. It is because this is a nation that has
consistently failed to create an environment to nurture our youth.

The blame for that stands squarely on our politicians. When
you look at Dail Eireann there is barely anyone under thirty in the House. We
have two parties with virtually no ideological differences and in the minds of
many the only difference is one is less corrupt than the other. We have parties
of self-preservation, whose main ideology is to maintain the status quo,
disregarding everyone else. That they have done so for ninety years is frightening.
We have a political establishment based on a twisted sense of nepotism. It is
quite shocking when you consider that most of the major players in our politics
got their seats when their father died – Enda Kenny, Brian Cowen, Brian Lenihan
to name but a few. Only this year, the second youngest TD in the Dail, Helen
McEntee was voted in to take the seat of her deceased father. Many, many more
examples are to be found in Leinster House. One can argue the merits of these individuals
but you can never get over the sense that what we have is the creation of a
political caste that stifles the desire for young people to enter in to
politics. Why waste your time when the party machine will vouch for the child
of a sitting TD?

With this selfish, self-preserving little bubble of
entitlement you get the most egregious cases of stupidity and selfishness. We
had a Seanad referendum based on the political opportunism of one man, Enda
Kenny. Completely refusing to consider reforming the upper house saying it was
abolition or the status quo no matter how dysfunctional it was, you had someone
ignoring the will of the people just so he could have something to pin on his
chest. Adding in a ruthless party whip system whose only goal is to turn TDs in
to mindless complicit vote-punching minions and all you have is an
establishment with no care for anyone but themselves.

There is a real lack of vision in this country. Our good
times in the past were not built on the ideas of people and entrepreneurs. It
was a convenient mix of demography and canny taxation. It seems the only thing
this government and previous governments have had keeping this country afloat
is by maintaining a few dozen multinationals on board by clever accounting. Let
us be clear, these corporations have no love for us other than allowing them to
park billions away from the taxman in their home countries and when the time
comes that some other country beats us in the tax game or Europe says we need
to grow up, they will leave. Yet all the time our youth are ignored or worse,
harassed and constrained. While we let Apple and Google away with accounting
murder, we slap our students with thousands in college fees then dump them on
the streets with no hope other than 100 euro in job seeking allowance for jobs
that are not even there. For the lucky few who have jobs and want to start a
family, they are financially robbed by shocking childcare costs and
guilt-tripped in to handing supposedly discretionary money to underfunded
schools. These are the people by birth and upbringing that have strong, natural
bonds to this country who in these bad times shed tears of sadness when forced
out of Ireland to find work, who will do anything to stay and make a better
life for themselves and the country here. These are the people who could create
our own version of Google and Apple but the government do not listen.

All the time our politicians do nothing. They just mumble
about fixing the finances as if that is the only thing they can do. There is no
thinking out of the box or considering other options to fix the economy other
than balancing the books. It’s like being locked out of your house and just
standing at the door thinking “Oh I just gotta stay here until someone brings a
key” without even trying a window or other means to get in. It is pure laziness
bred by entitlement and a gene pool disintegrating under nepotism. Our country
is slowly dying because a privileged few deny or worse, harass our greatest
resource. They ignore their input and destroy the social ecosystem needed for
them to grow. For all the talk of a tentative economic recovery, it is only a
short remission for a disease created in Leinster House.